The Bald Soprano, Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson and Exit the King, collected in this edition, are Eugène Ionesco's most famous and influential plays. The first edition of the collection in Bulgaria, translated by Boyana Petrova, dates from 1999. This new edition includes a special illustration by Theodore Ushev, and the artwork is by the artist Ivo Rafailov.
The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the great innovators of the modern stage, Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994) did not write his most popular play, The Bald Soprano, until 1950.
In Rhinoceros, as in his earlier plays, Ionesco startles audiences with a world that invariably erupts in explosive laughter and nightmare anxiety. A rhinoceros suddenly appears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two, then three, until the "movement" is universal: a transformation of average citizens into beasts. Finally, only one man remains. "I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!" Rhinoceros is a commentary on the absurdity of the human condition made tolerable only by self-delusion. It shows us the struggle of the individual to maintain integrity and identity alone in a world where all others have succumbed to the “beauty” of brute force, natural energy, and mindlessness.
Ionesco went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound.
As Ionesco has said, “Theater is not literature. . . . It is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means.”
Eugène Ionesco (1909 –1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century.
Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano which contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism and surrealism.
He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize.
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